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A Love Poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) A Study Guide cummings@cummingsstudyguides.net |
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Study
Guide Prepared by By Michael J. Cummings...©
2005
Type
of Work
Sonnet 43 is a love poem in the form of a sonnet. A sonnet is a 14-line poem with a specifc rhyme scheme and meter (usually iambic pentameter). This poetry format—which forces the poet to wrap his thoughts in a small, neat package—originated in Sicily, Italy, in the 13th Century with the sonnetto (meaning little song), which could be read or sung to the accompaniment of a lute. When English poets began writing poems in imitation of these Italian poems, they called them sonnets, a term coined from sonnetto. Frequently, the theme of a sonnet was love, or a theme related to love. However, the theme also sometimes centered on religion, politics, or other topics. Poets often wrote their sonnets as part of a series, with each sonnet a sequel to the previous one. For example, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote a series of 154 sonnets on the theme of love. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote a series of 44 sonnets, in secret, about the intense love she felt for her husband-to-be, poet Robert Browning. She called this series Sonnets From the Portuguese, a title based on the pet name Robert gave her: "my little Portugee." Sonnet 43 was the next-to-last sonnet in this series. In composing her sonnets, she had two types of sonnet formats from which to choose: the Italian model popularized by Petrarch (1304-1374) and the English model popularized by Shakespeare (1564-1616). She chose Petrarch's model. For an in-depth discussion and analysis of both sonnet models, click here. In 1850, the London firm of Chapman and Hall published Sonnet 22 and the other poems in Sonnets from the Portuguese in Poems, a revision of an 1844 collection of the same name. The
rhyme scheme of "Sonnet 43" is as follows: Lines 1
to 8—ABBA, ABBA; Lines
9 to 14—CD, CD, CD. Petrarch's sonnets also rhymed
ABBA and ABBA in the
first Sonnet 43 is in iambic pentameter (ten syllables, or five feet, per line with five pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables), as lines 2 and 3 of the poem demonstrate. I LOVE..|..thee TO..|..the DEPTH..|..and BREADTH..|..and HEIGHTFor a detailed discussion of meter, click here.
Theme: Intense Love Sonnet 43 expresses the poet’s intense love for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning. So intense is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level (lines 3 and 4). She loves him freely, without coercion; she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain. She even loves him with an intensity of the suffering (passion: line 9) resembling that of Christ on the cross, and she loves him in the way that she loved saints as a child. Moreover, she expects to continue to love him after death. The dominant figure of speech in the poem is anaphora—the use of I love thee in eight lines and I shall but love thee in the final line. This repetition builds rhythm while reinforcing the theme. Browning also uses alliteration, as the following examples illustrate: thee, the (Lines 1, 2, 5, 9, 12). By Elizabeth Barrett Browning Published in 1850 .
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Study Questions and Writing Topics
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